The Abstract Wild

In 1964, plans were being discussed for the creation of the Canyonlands National Park, near Moab, Utah.  Some wanted to include the Maze in the park.  The Maze is a stunning network of desert canyons, and it was extremely inaccessible at that time.  Few living people had ever seen it.

Jack Turner and his buddy were young rock-climbing adventure hogs.  Their plan was to fly into the Maze, land the plane on a long-abandoned bulldozer scrape, take some cool photos, and sell them to National Geographic.  Both survived the botched landing.  While wandering around in the Maze, they found ancient pictographs of life-sized human images.  The paintings had a striking presence, and the lads were mesmerized.  They had walked into a different dimension, a place alive with a strong aura of spirit power.

Today, the aura has faded.  The Maze is mapped and tamed.  Visitors can drive in and hike around on happy trails.  The pictographs have become photo opportunities for intrepid ecotourists.  The sacred wildness of the place has become banal, like a museum exhibit.  For the wild painters, who lived several thousand years ago, this place “was their home in a sense we can no longer imagine,” said Turner.  “Whoever they were, they knew how to express and present something we have lost.”

Later, Turner worked as a philosophy professor in Chicago, a soul-killing bad trip.  One day, he read a deep ecology essay by Arne Naess, and had a great awakening.  He suddenly realized that he was on the wrong path.  He escaped from the nightmare, and spent many years travelling around the world climbing mountains.  This included at least 16 years as a guide at Grand Teton National Park.

Deep ecology helped him understand the crucial difference between ecocentric thinking (the entire ecosystem is sacred) and anthropocentric thinking (only human desires matter).  This echoes the huge gap between the wild Maze painters and the civilized ecotourists.  It’s essentially the difference between sustainable and unsustainable cultures.

Wandering around the world taught him another vital lesson.  He visited cultures that were similar to the Maze painters, cultures with a profound spiritual connection to the past, the future, their community, and their sacred home.  All of their needs were provided by the place they inhabited.  Consequently, they lived with great care, striving to remain in balance with the land.

Today, the ecosystem is being hammered.  Typically, the designated villains include capitalism, greedy corporations, corrupt politicians, the evil enemy-of-the-day, and so on.  Turner rejected this.  The planet is being pummeled by a culture that is infested with absurd abstract ideas — more is better, get rich quick, grow or die.  This culture has reduced the natural world to an abstraction, a machine that must be controlled — a jumbo cookie jar for the amusement of infantile organisms.

So, Turner’s enemies are not the designated villains.  His enemies are abstractions, like the hallucinations that perceive a sacred old growth forest to be a calculable quantity of board feet, worth a calculable quantity of dollars.  Abstractions are the foundation of the madness, and they are formidable opponents.  They can make clear thinking impossible, and inspire remarkable achievements in foolishness.

In his book, The Abstract Wild, Turner describes why he has become a “belligerent ecological fundamentalist,” and why he stands on the side of the grizzly bears and mountain lions.  “Abstraction” is a word meaning mental separation, not a concrete object.  Wildness is “the relation of free, self-willed, and self-determinate ‘things’ with the harmonious order of the cosmos.”

There are eight essays in the book.  One examines wilderness management, a hotbed of professional control freaks.  This work is done under the banner of Science, a way of knowing that can understand processes and predict their activities.  What a joke!  We don’t understand friends or lovers.  We don’t understand ourselves.  Ecosystems are vastly more complex and chaotic.

Wildlife biologists have a history of making wildly incorrect predictions, often leading to embarrassing disasters.  Their clumsy conjuring is no more “science” than is astrology.  Humans should always avoid fooling around with DNA, atoms, or wilderness management.  “We are not that wise, nor can we be.”  Instead of trying to control nature by using a strategy based on hope, wishes, incomplete data, and misunderstanding, Turner recommends that we should get out of the way and leave the job to Big Mama Nature, who has a billion years of experience.  (The experts howl!)

Another essay snaps, snarls, and spits with rage.  Civilization has been brutally molesting the planet for 10,000 years, at an ever-increasing rate.  Over the centuries, we have responded to these assaults on wildness by forgiving and forgetting.  We’re now moving into the end game.  Despite being blasted by a fire hose of depressing news, we remain pathetically timid, helpless victims.  We accept a wrecked planet as normal, and refuse to utter a peep of protest.

Turner screams.  Enough forgiving and forgetting!  It’s time for some healthy rage.  It’s time to raise hell against the senseless destruction.  This is spiritual business, so it takes precedence over society’s laws.  Nature is sacred, and must be defended.  Destroying the planet is evil and unacceptable, even if it’s perfectly legal and great for the economy.

There are thousands of eco-books, and most tend to focus their attention on symptoms — climate change, deforestation, mass extinction, overpopulation, and so on.  To control these symptoms, they suggest a variety of treatments, including new government policies, techno miracles, lifestyle changes, and rebellion.  Turner has lived much of his life out of doors, and he feels a profound reverence and respect for wildness.  His book is rare for presenting this perspective, which is getting dimmer with every decade.

This perspective can help us move toward healing.  “We only value what we know and love, and we no longer know and love the wild,” he says.  “What we need now is a culture that deeply loves the wild earth.”  But the inmates of modernity have little intimate experience with wild nature, and almost no comprehension of what has been lost.  Wildness is something seen on TV.

We must rejoin the natural world.  This is still possible.  Turner succeeded.  Cool books, nature documentaries, and ecotourism cannot provide us with all we need to recover our wildness.  What’s needed is direct experience with a place, over time, complete immersion — observing the bird migrations, animal mating, leafing of trees, climate patterns, and so on.  A week in the mountains is never enough.

In the end, Turner presents us with a tantalizing bittersweet enigma.  He reveals to us the one and only silver bullet solution that can actually heal us, and guide us back home to the family of life.  But this solution is impossible, as long as there are so many people, living so hard.  The shamans have much work to do, to redirect our hearts toward healthy paths.  It’s time for the clans of creative folks to seize their power, work to exorcise our culture’s terrible demons, and rekindle forgotten love.

Turner, Jack, The Abstract Wild, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1996.

The book’s first chapter, the Maze story, is online.  Click on “Read Excerpt” beneath the book cover HERE.

To view a 100-minute video of Turner, click HERE.

The Wayfinders

Long, long ago, Teutonic storytellers told tales by the fire.  Many of them mention a deity who was a wisdom seeker, singer, poet, and warrior.  Odin had two ravens, Huginn and Muninn, who daily flew out over the world, observed the events, and returned to report the news.  The names of his birds meant “thought” and “memory.”  Odin cherished these ravens.  He knew that the loss of thought would be terrible, but that the loss of memory would be far worse.  Thought is clever and useful, but memory is essential and indispensable.  When thought is disconnected from memory, the result is the world outside your window.

Wade Davis is very tuned into the high cost of forgetfulness.  Modern folks have not only forgotten who we are, and where we are from, but we are busy erasing the surviving remnants of much ancient knowledge.  There are about 7,000 languages in the world today, and half are approaching extinction.

When we wander amidst an endless herd of loud and smelly consumers, it’s easy to forget that our worldview is just one of many.  Our culture is a freak in human history, because of its blitzkrieg on future generations of all species.  Most perceive this to be perfectly normal; it’s all they know.  In his book, The Wayfinders, Davis takes us on a fascinating tour, visiting lucky people who have not been cut loose from their past.

We have been trained to perceive other cultures as inferior and primitive.  When the British washed up on the shore of Australia, they failed to recognize and respect the incredible genius of the Aborigines.  Through tens of thousands of years of trial and error, the natives learned how to live in balance with a damaged ecosystem that was hot, dry, and lean.  The white colonists have attempted to transplant a European way of life, which is starkly inappropriate, and can only exist temporarily.

The Aborigines have a network of travel routes that were sung into existence by the ancestors.  The songs describe the landmarks that travelers will find along the route.  If you know the song, you know the route.  Songs are maps.  The routes are called songlines.  The entire continent is spiritually alive, and the people have a remarkable awareness of place, and a profound reverence for it.

The Polynesian culture is found on thousands of islands scattered across a vast region of the Pacific.  The Spanish first encountered them in 1595, when they arrived in the Marquesas, a society of 300,000 people.  Within a month, eighty-five percent of the people died from European diseases.  For some reason, the islanders thought that the visitors were demons.

Polynesians were highly skilled at sea travel.  They built excellent catamarans, using Stone Age technology, that were fifty percent faster than the floating monstrosities from Spain.  Even with their state of the art sextants and charts, Europeans remained primitive navigators who got nervous when they drifted beyond sight of land.

Davis went on a voyage with Polynesians who remembered the ancient knowledge.  The navigators always knew exactly where they were.  They paid careful attention to the wind, clouds, stars, wave patterns, sky colors.  They noted the water’s salinity, phosphorescence, plant debris, and temperature.  Sharks, dolphins, porpoises, and birds provided information.  For example, white terns indicated land within 200 kilometers (124 mi.), and boobies stayed within 40 kilometers (25 mi.) of land.

On the Sahara, the people who understand the desert do not get lost.  They can read the winds, the texture of the sand, and the forms of the dunes.  They can smell water.  In Canada, the vast province of Nunavut is home to the Inuit people.  They were geniuses for surviving in a harsh climate with Stone Age technology.  Travelling by dogsled in the long months of darkness, they never got lost, because they were experts at reading the snow.

These older cultures learned how to adapt to their ecosystems, because this encouraged stability and survival.  They were blessed to inhabit ecosystems that did not provide ideal conditions for the birth of industrial nightmares.  Unfortunately, they have been “discovered.”  They now live in the shadow of spooky people from industrial nightmares.  Many natives have been absorbed into the consumer monoculture, and have lost their identity.

All species routinely produce mutations.  The mutants that can smoothly blend into the ecosystem, and live in balance with it, have a decent chance at continuing in the dance of evolution.  Disruptive mutants eventually end up on the bus to Extinctionville.

Experts now believe that the San people of the Kalahari may be the oldest culture on Earth.  As humankind migrated out of Mother Africa, folks found themselves in ecosystems quite different from their tropical place of origin.  Different regions inspired different cultural mutations.  

Social Darwinists typically imagine a hierarchy of cultures, with industrial civilization at the gleaming pinnacle.  Every student in our culture has this dodgy notion repeatedly pounded into his or her brain.  It is a sacred myth that is commonly mistaken for truth.  Colonists felt a religious obligation to illuminate primitive people, invite them into the wondrous world of wage slavery, and provide them with brassieres and Bibles.

Well, Big Mama Nature is in a rather furious mood these days, and she’s in the process of pounding an unforgettable lesson into our cheesy civilized brains.  It’s called reality — reaping what you sow.  Our culture is a psychopathic mutant, an immaculate failure.  We could not be farther from the pinnacle of successful adaptation, or closer to the tar pits of Extinctionville (can you smell the methane?).

Davis takes us on many intriguing side trips.  In remote regions of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta we find cultures that escaped from the colonial invaders, and have not been severed from their roots.  They call themselves the Older Brothers, the guardians of the world.  We are the immature Younger Brothers, the zombie-like demolition crew.  They are sure that the Younger Brothers will eventually wake up — when Big Mama Nature pulls the rug out from under us.  They invite us to join them, and live with respect for life.

Our culture has created a monster that is a menace to all life on Earth.  A culture of perpetual growth is both insane and suicidal.  We need to stop destroying ancient cultures.  Every culture that goes extinct removes important knowledge for living on Earth.  Older cultures provide living proof that there are other ways of thinking and living, and they can inspire us to search for the long-forgotten wisdom that lies outside the walls.  Stable long-lasting cultures are far more interesting than flash-in-the-pan burnouts.  Imagination gets better mileage than despair or denial.

Davis, Wade, The Wayfinders — Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World, Anansi Press, Toronto, 2009.

YouTube has several videos of Davis talking about The Wayfinders.